How many hours a week do you work? Let’s look at a not untypical working week for a corporate citizen. Rising every day from Monday through Friday at 630am. Since reading and answering e-mails likely starts pretty much straight away, the working day has begun. Travelling in by car means making lots of phone calls to get the day underway. Travelling in by train means reading and preparing reports. Meetings, calls, e-mails all day. Probably leaving the office around 6pm, since anything earlier just looks like indolence. Calls or reports on the way home. We’ve now been going for 12 hours, but of course we’re not finished. Put the kids to bed, have dinner and catch up with family life, then just a few quick things before bed so that we can start the new day in control. If we work for a US company then we’ll have the ubiquitous conference call as well. So into bed and we’ve clocked up probably 14 hours. 5 days is 70 hours. We are already way over the number of hours proven to increase the risks to our health. Ah, but we still have the weekend. Probably a couple of hours on Saturday, since we’re now a bit pissed off with it all, plus our spouse has sneakily arranged things to distract us. We maintain this distraction through most of Sunday, but then that Sunday evening feeling starts to grow (around late afternoon) and we know we need to get the new week prepared. So we do a few hours on Sunday evening – of course we’re watching TV and our body is physically present with the family, but actually we’re at work. How frequently our spouses complain that we’re ‘not present’. We get defensive because we know they’re right. Total number of hours for the week – likely to be around 80.

Increasingly we are seeing the links between long working hours and physical and mental illness proven. Working 55 hours or more per week is linked to a 33% greater risk of stroke and a 13% increased risk of developing coronary heart disease compared with working a standard 35 to 40 hour week Science Daily (2015). And we’re doing 80! God help us when we try and keep up with machines…….

So even if we sleep well, and many of us do through sheer exhaustion, we are ramping up the likelihood that we will succumb to physical and mental issues at some point – and maybe dangerously so. Headaches, stomach upsets, back pain - early warning signs of anything from stroke to heart attack, gastric problems to diabetes to cancer, depression to psychosis.

But overwork and sleep deprivation often go together, in some crazy dance of dependency. Sleeplessness can set in, further exacerbating the physical strain on our bodies. You may recall Antonio Horta-Orsorio the CEO of Lloyds being signed off work for two months in 2011 with what was publicly communicated as a chronic case of insomnia. Some of us self medicate (the ubiquitous couple of glasses of wine in the evening to wind down).

In suffering a cataclysmic result of extreme stress, and the poisonous cocktail of overwork and sleep deprivation, you may not go the straightforward route of having a stroke or heart attack. You may end up going the far more complicated route of some form of mental breakdown. ‘Burnout’ is a pretty common corporate phenomenon these days, with many senior leaders reporting being burned out to some degree. But what exactly is ‘burnout?’ In ‘normal’ life we’d probably simply diagnose the individual as being depressed – emotional exhaustion, low self esteem and possibly even self loathing, helplessness, hopelessness, isolation, loneliness, futility, impotence etc etc.

One of the most extreme manifestations of ‘burnout’ is the condition known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, an extreme example of how initially neurological issues come to be manifested in completely physical conditions.

Cara Tomas is a PhD student at Newcastle University, now studying Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She had herself been rendered bedbound with CFS 13 years earlier. ‘White blood cells in people with CFS are as listless as the people themselves often feel. She found that mitochondria in CFS cells can’t produce energy properly, pointing to a physiological, not a psychological disorder. Control cells consumed twice as much oxygen as the CFS cells, with the disparity widening dramatically when the cells were stressed. Cells from people with CFS can’t raise their output to meet the energy demands of routine tasks’. Andy Coghlan (Nov 2017)

Stress is the number one cause of absenteeism, and as we’ve seen the most seemingly all pervading stress on corporate citizens today is not caused by the reality of any fear they should have over being sacked, it is almost entirely self generated and self inflicted. I am not saying that corporate leaders can absolve themselves of any responsibility in this, since they are ultimately responsible for the working cultures that foster such self inflicted torture.

Under pressure and in a heightened threat state, people will surely misinterpret the motives of their colleagues, to the absolute detriment of trust going forward. These dynamics become the classic self-fulfiling prophesy – if I perceive you as untrustworthy, I will become so myself and we will both be proven right.

It’s also the source of us being quicker to go to Child or Victim mode in reaction to an undesired event – we throw a strop, we sulk, we bemoan our fate, we jump instantly to condemn and blame others, endowing them with a pre-meditated malice that really does betray the start of madness.

Our responses to human distress malfunction – we seem to be suffering from a form of empathy burnout, where either we are just plain immune to the plight of others, or at the opposite extreme we are almost overwhelmed as we feel the pain of others who are unknown to us (even though we are not necessarily motivated to take action to salve it for them). In this state we really shouldn’t watch that documentary on the famine in South Sudan, or walk past the homeless beggar in the street, and if we do then we can at least have some legitimacy in adopting a ‘but what can I do?’ impotence. The more pragmatic question is whether we can walk past the immoral or unethical or even illegal thing that is happening under our very nose at work.

Excerpted from:

‘Corporate Emotional Intelligence - Being Human in a Corporate World’ - Gareth Chick

Recommended Article: Corporate Traumatic Stress Disorder - Gareth Chick